


even the stars, they burn

by superfluouskeys



Category: Mass Effect - All Media Types, Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: F/F, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Mentions Past Relationships, Multi, POV First Person, Post-Canon, Post-Mass Effect 3, Shepard Survives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-24
Updated: 2017-07-24
Packaged: 2018-12-06 12:17:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11600478
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superfluouskeys/pseuds/superfluouskeys
Summary: Shepard survives, and wonders what that even means.





	even the stars, they burn

**Author's Note:**

> I made a terrible decision called a flirt-with-nearly-everyone run of Mass Effect. I had too much time on my hands and I love causing drama and weird game bugs and I am Sorry. Also my love of writing first-person Shepard reigns.

There's a place that's kind of separate from the world of the living or the dead.  I've always wondered if that's where the asari take their loved ones.  They carve out a space for themselves in a world beyond human comprehension, and that space lingers even after they've abandoned it.

That's where I awoke when Cerberus decided to piece my corpse back together, though I didn't recognize it at the time.  That's where I awaken now, after the galaxy has exploded and maybe there's nothing left to return to.  Without Liara, it's just another cold, empty nothing.

I can feel it now, though.  Her presence, or maybe her absence lingers here, and it's the only way I can be sure we're both still alive.  Who the hell knows where what's left of my body has crash-landed this time?  It doesn't seem possible.  I've defied the odds so many times that the prospect of life and death situations has rendered me numb.

Towards the end I wondered whether there would be any hope for me if I survived this.  I was a fucking disaster in the few months I spent relieved of duty, and there's no pretending that my actions throughout the course of that last desperate mission were anywhere near sane.  My interpersonal skills off the field were never my strong suit, but I think I really made a mess of it recently.  Talking to people turned into this wild desire to connect, to feel something, anything, to remind myself I still could.

I can't blame Liara for keeping her distance.  It barely even seems important now, the way it stung when she sent me away with a few curt words and hurt shining in her eyes.  Now it's like I've grown so used to all-encompassing pain that lesser injuries don't even make any impact.

I blink, slowly, and it takes a monumental effort, but I can see rock and dirt and grass around me, even feel them under my hands, a little.  It's dark, and I can't tell if that's real or in my mind.  I try to move, and it's a mistake.  Everything hurts.  God, I hope I haven't managed to survive a blast that devastated the galaxy only to waste away in some forgotten cave somewhere.  That would be a damn shitty way to go.

The whole thing feels like a terrible dream, like those annoying ones I kept having about running through a forest with children on fire.  The overwhelming pain all over my body is almost grounding, in its way.  There's a place, separate from the world of the living and the dead, that transcends physical location, where I can feel the remnants of Liara's presence, and that feels like breathing.  I dig my fingers into the rock and grass and dirt around me, take the pain as a reminder that I am real, and inhale as deeply as I can manage.

So many good people are dead.  People way better than me.  Likely even some of the people I thought had a chance are gone by now.  Of course it's on me that my last memories of them will be with that staggering hurt in their eyes, somehow both infinitely milder and infinitely more personal than any galaxy-threatening enemy.

Kelly.  Garrus.  Traynor.  Samara.  Each so...bizarrely meaningful for a handful of minutes, or days, or months, even.  But maybe I'm just not made for love.  God knows it's a thought I've entertained before.  What is love supposed to amount to, anyway?  You get married and have a kid and build a life and maybe someday some unknowable force comes along and destroys it all?  You spend years working and building and maybe you never get to see even the beginning of whatever you're struggling for?

I don't even remember my parents anymore.  Not really.  There are fragments, but I'm not sure if the memories are mine, or what I read or saw or heard or was made to believe later.  People said they were good people, that they were happy, but what else are you going to say to me?  Are you going to look an overgrown kid in the eye and tell her that her parents were shitty people and everyone hated them?  Are you going to look an infamous war hero in the eye and tell her that her parents didn't love her, or each other, and she'd have been better off never even thought of?

And most of the people I know have no better luck in relationships.  The best examples that come to mind, the things that give me the most hope I can imagine, are objectively pretty squalid.  Distant caring, strained extranet messages every few months if you're lucky, and then, if you're lucky, you get a day or a few hours or a few minutes together in the same room once every handful of years, and you hope so desperately that that little slice of time goes well that it just makes you crazy and anxious, and do you even enjoy yourself?

It's funny, having time to have these thoughts.  I guess they've been plagueing me for awhile.  But I think for the last year or whatever it's been since I was pieced back together my thought process has just been _survive, survive, survive_ , on an endless, visceral repeat.  It's almost a reprieve to hear a new idea.

I don't know how long it is before I can move.  Time is no longer of the essence.  Mostly I tarry in the empty space where Liara lingers.  Sometimes I think I can hear her voice, calling my name from somewhere far away, but I can't tell when I'm dreaming and when I'm awake, and maybe I'm both, and maybe I'm neither, and I've died after all.

The place where I've landed must not be too terrible, if I haven't died simply from lying here breathing the air for days or weeks on end.  I'm sure once I'm back on my feet I can identify it, whatever good that will do me.

I realize, with a suddenness that brings the world around me into razor-sharp focus, that I had never really intended to survive the final push against the Reapers.  This strange, horrible presence in the galaxy so quickly became my life's work, my entire purpose for existing, that it seemed only right that I should die in the final battle.  What other reason could I possibly have for living?  Where will I go, what will I do, now that I've accomplished the only goal that's mattered to me since it overtook my senses?

My body feels better before my face does.  Damned Cerberus implants.  So irritating how the things that hold you together are also the things that tear you apart.  I'll bet I look like a scarred-up, glowy-eyed monster again.  Can't wait to terrify some random village of civilians. 

I emerge into the light on hands and knees in search of water, and lean heavily on my inhuman streak of good luck in hoping the water is drinkable.  The wildlife gives away that I'm somewhere on Earth, at least, and that's a hell of a lot more than I had to hope for an hour ago.  I wish I could pry off what's left of my suit and armour, but that might also be holding me together, for all I can tell.  Better to wait it out until I can get some semblance of proper medical attention.

It takes all I have to cobble together a little bit of food, and as I lie back in the grass by the water to rest, only then does the reality of it settle in.  Clear afternoon sky.  Drinkable water.  Normal wildlife.  No ancient nightmare machines in the sky.  The Reapers are gone.  The Reapers are gone, the war is over, and I am alive.

When next I revisit the waking world, it's early morning.  I imagine I slept all night and didn't even see the stars, and all I can hear, far above the sounds of birds chirping and rushing water, is Liara's voice, calling my name from somewhere beyond my reach.

Loving Liara seemed so easy and so right at first, and that was, of course, its downfall.  I like to think that if things had been different when I saw her again, I wouldn't have been such an ass, but I like to think a lot of things, and I don't know if that one is even remotely true.  When I saw her again, she was distant and different, because she had already grieved me, and then I had come back, and for my part, it had only felt like a couple of weeks since everything had been impossibly, overwhelmingly wonderful between us.

That was what it was like with everyone in those days.  All my old friends, with the possible exception of Garrus, looked at me like I was a ghost, and more than that, a very unwelcome one.  With the rest of them I found a way to understand.  With Liara...

With Liara, it was like a switch had flipped somewhere, and there was no undoing it, and no understanding it, and suddenly nothing felt like anything anymore.  And the truth is that no matter how much I wanted everything to go back to the way it had been, and no matter how readily Liara embraced my feeble pretense, there was still that switch, that distance, or darkness, or haze between us, and instead of trying to breach it, I...

But she showed me this place again anyway, before the final battle; the one we'd created together, apart from the world of the living and the dead, apart from time and space and all those things we mortals cling to.  At the time I thought maybe it was just a kindness, because she, too, thought I might not make it out of this one.

But now that I'm here again, now that I can feel her presence lingering here, my fragile, feeble hopes are horribly, painfully renewed.  She hasn't abandoned this place we created together yet. 

Liara hasn't given up on me.


End file.
